The statements in this section merely provide background information related to the present disclosure and may not constitute prior art.
Owing to the misuse and abuse of health care provider contact information, such as a doctor's cell phone number, for example, and in order to preserve the valuable time of the doctor, current human Answering Services and/or Call Centers are in place to manually facilitate communication between care providers. In this regard, Call Centers function to coordinate various receiver preferences like who is on call and how they would like to receive messages pertaining to their patients. However, as each physician group is different, and each physician within the physician groups and/or hospital has their own contact preferences it can be extremely difficult for a care provider (such as a nurse or doctor, for example) to make contact with another care provider in a timely fashion.
To this end, Care Coordination is a vital role of the nursing staff. In order for nurses to be most effective, it is critical that they have access to communication technologies capable of delivering patient information to a care provider in an expedient manner. Currently, nurses spend significant amounts of time using conventional methods of communication trying to reach a physician or send a message. Effective communication helps avoid costly errors, saves time, and allows nurses to deliver the quality care that patients deserve. Ideally, in an emergency situation, the nurse should be able to call the physician directly, update the patient's status, and get instructions regarding the patient care.
Conventional contact methods are highly variable, with each medical staff member employing a unique and often complex algorithm to determine exactly who to contact and then how that physician should be reached at any given moment in time. Accessing physicians requires maintaining multiple phone lists, contact instructions, and call schedules—all of which must be referenced and interpreted with each physician-contact attempt. Breakdowns in communication are commonplace, resulting in thousands of hours of wasted time.
Background FIG. 1 is an exemplary flowchart 10 demonstrating a conventional contact cycle between one care provider (in this instance a nurse) and another care provider (in this instance a Physician). As shown, the typical process can involve upwards of 10 different steps and can take approximately 20 minutes from start to finish. As will be readily apparent to those of skill in the art, such delays in providing patient information can mean the difference between life and death in an emergency situation.
In addition to the problems noted above, there currently exists little to no fully auditable communication methods available in a health care setting to keep track of the various communications happening between care providers. Without this information, it is exceedingly difficult to ensure quality control and best practices are being followed.
Yet another problem revolves around HIPAA compliant communications. Currently, communication about patient care occurs through various channels and methods where patient information is not kept confidential and the messaging method is not secure. This results in HIPAA violation as most of this communication is pertained to patient personal information.
Accordingly, to solve all the inconveniences contained in the state of the art, the present invention provides a unified web enabled platform capable of providing sustained, highly efficient and auditable communication among individuals and entities within a given industry. Such a platform can function to improve work flow and productivity, and can function to decrease errors related to poor communication process.
Additional related systems and/or methods pertaining to non-unified communication methodologies include the following documents, the contents of each of which are incorporated herein by reference: U.S. Pat. Nos. 8,385,528, 5,754,111, and patent publication numbers US-2006-0010218, US-2012-0315867.